Clause 7 - Energy requirements of buildings
Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill
9:30 am
Mr Alan Simpson (Nottingham South, Labour)
Perhaps I should begin with a declaration of interest. I am about to do precisely what the clause suggests, and I suppose that that gives me a vested interest in supporting it. The reason I mention that is that, having acquired a derelict shell in the middle of Nottingham, with a view to doing work on it over the next year, I have been surprised at the reactions of the people I count as my friends. By and large they think, albeit affectionately, that I am daft. I shall not ask hon. Members to comment, but the experience raises issues, for me, about the extent to which our exhortations as a Government to take the sustainability agenda seriously are believed by the public. If one cannot get one's friends to believe that one is serious, how does one get doubters to believe it?
The Labour Government have the right to be proud of a great deal. We are the only Government in history who have set a target to eradicate fuel poverty in its entirety by 2016, eradicating fuel poverty for those in greatest need by 2010. We will be faced with the practical issue of how to deal with those parts of the housing stock that present the greatest difficulties—the hard-to-heat housing stock. There is no question but that we are going to have to address the issue of renewable energies in that process.
I was reading a report from Neighbourhood Energy Action, Stratford-on-Avon district council and South Warwickshire housing association, which set out their initiative for solutions to rural fuel poverty. I was taken aback by a simple fact in the introduction: it points out that 28 per cent. of the rural population do not have access to mains gas, which is the cheapest fuel
for home heating. If we combine that with the presence of solid wall properties and the inability to put in cavity wall insulation, there is no question but that we are going to have to look towards renewable energy to address the energy needs of the 21st century. The question is how we do that.
Quite a long time ago, my local authority in Nottingham invested in a district heating system that took domestic waste and put the heat that it generated back into heating for 20,000 to 30,000 homes in the city along with the courts and the major commercial centre. The authority faced many difficulties but in principle it was right to do that.
When I look at the list of initiatives that have been taken in the decades since, I see that they are very few. As I understand it, only one project, in Southampton, attempts to harness geothermal energy. That is an imaginative project, and we should welcome and support it. Grants are now available for photovoltaics, and those are welcome even though the installation costs are still substantial for most households that would consider it—barely affordable, unless one is starting from a position of gutting the place.
We have to look at the mechanisms and incentives for local authorities. I was almost tempted to say to the hon. Member for Hazel Grove that in introducing and speaking in support of clause 7 he ought perhaps to have rebranded it as a counter-terrorist measure. We ought to get the chief scientific advisor to come and add his comments—or not—about the risk that ignoring climate change and the energy and carbon emissions that we generate will be the greatest threat to our society for the rest of our lives. To give local authorities the permission to set targets seems to me not to be an undue burden at all.
The danger is that we will go from saying that this is light-touch, non-intrusive regulation to not being serious. That is the greatest threat that we face in undermining so much of what the Government have done. We have taken the important steps, and in many respects we have taken seriously the easy steps in that process. However, we now know that we have hit a critical position in our warm front programme. There are only so many low-energy light bulbs that people can eat; one would want to fit only so many draught excluders; only so many properties can take cavity wall insulation; and one can only bung in so much loft insulation.
We have to look not just at the consumption of energy but at the generation of energy. That is why giving local authorities the permission to give the lead in practical terms to the arguments set out nationally by the Government in theoretical terms does not seem to be an intrusive burden. In fact it is almost a green light to get local authorities on our side. If we can do that as a Committee and a Government, we need to ask ourselves why we would want not to give that green light of encouragement.